


Lavender Blue

by Hibou_Gris



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Arielle POV, Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Mosaic Timeline (The Magicians: A Life in the Day), Multi, Polyamory, Romance, this is very soft, with just a hint of sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25255192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hibou_Gris/pseuds/Hibou_Gris
Summary: For the longest time, Arielle thinks it’s just another joke.
Relationships: Arielle/Quentin Coldwater, Arielle/Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 26
Kudos: 107





	Lavender Blue

For the longest time, Arielle thinks it’s just another joke. Eliot and Quentin seem to have an endless supply: jokes and stories and jokes _about_ stories, layered on top of each other until they’re incomprehensible, like they’re speaking their own private language even when each word on its own is familiar.

Lunk finds them maddening - “I can’t believe you want to spend the whole evening listening to those foreign knobheads talk nonsense,” he says, still griping even as they’re coming through the trees, nearly at the clearing where _their hosts are waiting for them_ , Ember’s hairy ballsack, as though Lunk has any high ground when it comes to throwing around the word knobhead, and Arielle shifts the small cask of wine in her arms so that she can swat him on the shoulder. 

“Shh, we’re nearly there - and it’s not as if you had anything else planned for tonight,” Arielle says. 

“I had a plan, I’ve got plenty of plans,” Lunk says.

Arielle snorts, because that’s stinking mound of horseshit if she’s ever heard it - Lunk’s never planned a single thing in his life, except maybe another night at the tavern, tossing back ale and inevitably losing half their money playing dice against Longears, that filthy cheating hare. 

Lunk shoots her a sly look, reaches over to wrap his strong arm around her waist so he can tug her close against him. “I did too have a plan, oh Arielle the Untrusting.”

He smiles down at her, and Arielle smiles back, feels herself melt for one foolish half-second, and then Lunk slides his hand lower to grope at her buttocks and says, “I had a plan for this - and for your sweet mouth, and your sweet -”

“Uh,” Quentin says, from where he’s leaning against the table at the edge of the clearing, setting out serving dishes of food. “Uh - hi! Arielle, good to see you, and - Lunk. You too.”

Arielle straightens up and shoves Lunk’s hand off her arse, says, “Quentin, hello, we’re so pleased to - oh, bugger a hedgehog -” as she one-handedly fumbles the wine cask and Quentin has to rush forward to keep it from smashing to the ground. Lunk only sighs, and drops his own contribution to the ground, a sack of turnips and onions from his mother’s garden.

“Shit, shit - okay, I got it,” Quentin says. “Here, do you want me to put this - do we have to open it, does it need to breathe, is that a thing?”

“Arielle, Lunk!” Eliot says, gliding out of the cottage with more dishes in his hands. “Welcome to our humble abode.” 

“Breathe? Why would it have to - it’s not alive, it’s wine?” Arielle says, and passes the cask over to Quentin, who heads off towards the table with it. 

“Q, over here with that,” Eliot says, then deposits his plates on the table with a huff and snaps his fingers, pointing at the bench. “No, here, here!”

“Yes, your Majesty,” Quentin says, rolling his eyes. “Whatever your High-Kingliness commands,” and then waspishly, “He’s been like this all day,” as he walks past Arielle and Lunk.

Arielle laughs, Eliot tosses back, “I’ve been making the fucking dinner all day, you ingrate!” and Lunk leans over to whisper in her ear, “If we leave early, we’ll still have enough time for _my_ plan -”

She pinches him hard in the side, ignores his wounded look. Lunk is tall and handsome and has a lovely cock, and is generally amenable to letting her do as she pleases, all desirable traits in a paramour, but no one has ever accused him of having a sharp wit, and she can ride him in the hayloft behind the tavern any other day of week - tonight, they’re guests at what Eliot calls a _dinner party_ and she’s going to enjoy every minute of it on the value of its novelty alone. Eliot and Quentin are - well, yes, incomprehensible and foreign and occasionally condescending knobheads, but they’re also _interesting_ , a vast improvement over the last quester, that old crank who’d never purchased a single godsforsaken piece of fruit from her in the year he’d spent crouched over the mosaic.

Now it’s Eliot and Quentin who are crouched over the mosaic every day, and Arielle gets to come by and enjoy the view - and see a bit of magic, or listen to Eliot sing a new song from his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire, or hear one of Quentin’s stories, always accompanied by hand-waving and sometimes by full-body re-enactment - and answer their questions, because while they may be foreign magicians overflowing with jokes and songs and stories, they’re utterly hopeless at any number of commonplace things. And Arielle can admit to herself that it’s flattering to be asked, to be looked to as a source of a knowledge, so she comes to the mosaic and tells them how to fix the holes in their roof, the easiest method to jar fruit, which nearby villages have the best market days, and even one day, bizarrely, explains the intricacies of marriage - 

(“Oh, and Del the Miller is back to playing hide the sausage with Sweet Grelda, and if his wife finds out she really might set something on fire this time -”

“His wife?” Quentin had looked up from the tiles, frowning. “How can he be - um, playing hide the sausage with Sweet Grelda if he’s married? What about the fidelity magic?”

“Fidelity magic? They’re not -” Arielle had laughed, then glanced around with a sudden crash of religious superstition, as though Umber might be leaning against a nearby tree waiting to strike her down for blasphemy. “They’re only country-married, no one around here is important enough to be wed with a full magical hand-binding. And to never be able to lie with anyone else unless your spouse is dead? That’s pure insanity, that’s the real reason the nobles and rich merchant families are always murdering each other, if you ask me -”

Quentin and Eliot had both been staring at her in wide-eyed surprise by then, and she had stopped, her mouth falling open, because - “Is that what all marriages are like where you’re from?”

“No,” Eliot had said shortly, and jerked his hand away from where he’d been twisting one of his rings.)

So - she and Lunk stay for dinner, which is delicious, even if some of the flavor combinations Eliot had chosen are - unusual ( _experimental_ , Eliot says), and they stay after dinner too, lingering long after the sun’s gone down and the fireflies are twining their lazy, blinking way through the trees around them. After Arielle’s wine is finished, they open up a cask or two of Eliot and Quentin’s wine, and Arielle’s head is light and floaty and everyone looks beautiful in the flickering glow of the torches. She talks Quentin into telling her the next part of the story about the little gentleman and his gardener, and Eliot starts arguing with him over the details, which leads to them drunkenly acting out a scene that involves a lot of yelling about elves and dwarves and Eliot bursting into giggles every time he tries to say, “One does not simply -”

“Umber’s holy taint, one does not simply _what_?” Lunk finally snarls, and Eliot collapses to the ground and howls, his long limbs sprawled across the empty mosaic square, while Quentin nudges him with his foot and says, “El, come on, we have to finish, the _integrity_ of the _scene_ , El -”

But the downside of all that wine is that it makes Lunk handsy again, and she shoves his hand away from her bosom for the third time, hisses at him, “Enough, this isn’t the tavern - ugh, you should have been raised by wolves, they would have taught you some manners -” 

Lunk leans away from her, folding his arms sulkily. “Oh, sure, sorry, wouldn’t want to embarrass you in front of such fine company -”

Quentin’s looking over at them, his eyes narrowing; he opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, Eliot shoots to his feet and says, “Lunk, hey, come see the distiller, see how it’s coming along -” and hustles Lunk up from the table and over to the far side of the clearing. “It can’t wait, it’s vital you look at it right now, what if it - it - _explodes_ , my reputation would never recover from such a needlessly tragic end to my first dinner party -”

Arielle glances at Quentin sidelong - she’s not embarrassed, exactly, it’s not as if Eliot and Quentin have any illusions that she’s a blushing spring maid in a meadow (she and Eliot had once spent nearly two minutes trading obscene vegetable puns, completely deadpan, daring the other to break, until Quentin, who had been lost in one of his quiet, melancholy moods for days, had at last cracked a smile and said with deep feeling, “You two are the _worst_ ,” and Eliot had beamed at him and then at Arielle as if they’d won a prize). But - but. She wants Quentin to think well of her. 

“You - he shouldn’t -” Quentin starts, but she doesn’t like where that’s leading, so she interrupts him.

“You’ll have to show me the rest of the scene another time,” Arielle says, and Quentin looks down at the ground, and then nods, comes back to sit with her at the table. 

“Right, and you have finish the one about Queen Amelia the Audacious’ quest to save the first dragon,” he says, clearly letting go of his anger with Lunk, which she appreciates.

“Of course. You’re good at it, you know, the play-acting,” Arielle says, leaning her head on her hand. It’s heavy, her whole body is heavy now, and she wishes she could just stretch out on ground and fall asleep under the stars, instead of having to walk all the way back to her uncle’s house, escorted by Lunk. “Good at pretending to be a king.” Eliot is better, but she’s not so drunk that she can’t keep that to herself.

Quentin laughs; there’s an odd tone to it. “Hm, yeah, that’s - true.” He tilts forward toward her, across the table. “Can I tell you a secret?”

His eyes are lit with mischief, his voice soft-slurred with wine, and Arielle bends closer in synchrony without even thinking about it. “Of course, I love secrets.”

“This is a good one,” Quentin says, then lowers his voice to a near-whisper. “Me and Eliot? We were kings, before. Before we came here.”

Arielle blinks. “Quentin, you -” She moves her face close to his, looks deep into his eyes. “You - are _so full of shit_.”

She falls back against the table, laughing, and Quentin laughs too, even as he sputters, “It’s true, though, it’s true! I shouldn’t even tell you, we’re trying not to - we can’t fuck up the timeline -”

“The what?”

“And Eliot only took one semester of Horomancy, which is less than useless -”

“Did you just - whore-o-mancy?” 

“No, no,” Quentin says, waving his hands desperately, but it’s too late, Arielle’s laughing so hard she’s crying, and Quentin gives up and drops his head onto the table, laughs with her, the two of them snorting and gasping for air, and Arielle doesn’t for one single second believe that what he’s said is true.

* * *

“Take a walk with me?” Quentin asks, and Arielle follows him along the path through the woods, up the hill until they’re standing at the top, long grass and wildflowers waist-high around them and the valley spread out before them, the fields and farms rolling down towards Whitespire and the sea. The heat of the day is fading to a hazy warmth, and Arielle closes her eyes for a moment, listens to the droning hum of the cicadas, holds her hands out to feel the grass skim against her fingers, scraping at the scratches left after a morning spent clearing brush out of her uncle’s east pasture.

“Do you want to?” Quentin says, like the words are choking their way out of him, and Arielle opens her eyes. Quentin looks away, then visibly steels himself and looks back. “What Eliot said. Do you want to?”

She’d been kissing Quentin good-bye at the door of the cottage, saying, “It’s only one day that I have to watch the children, my aunt will be back tomorrow, so I’ll come over afterwards -”

“And stay the night?” Quentin had said, stealing another kiss.

“Yes, I’ll stay the night, you smug bastard,” Arielle had said, laughing - her uncle had had nothing but for praise for Quentin since he’d fixed the wheels on the market day wagon, and allowed their scandalous sleepovers with nothing more than a head-shake, so she spends almost as many nights at Quentin and Eliot’s as she does in her own bed these days. 

“Stay forever,” Eliot had said off-handedly, not looking up from the pattern of tiles that he was laying out, but - it hadn’t sounded like a joke.

Arielle had frozen, uncertain, teetering on the edge of - something, some feeling like the world was swooping away from her - and Quentin had looked at Eliot, and then at her, and had asked her to go for a walk.

And now Quentin is waiting for her to answer his question, and she starts to say yes - (it’s yes for a lot of reasons, for his careful hands and the way he listens to her with his full attention and talks too fast when he’s excited, for magic and stories and his hot clever mouth between her legs, but mostly it’s the way he looks at her, his heart cracked open in his eyes, the way he had said, “You’re too good for him anyway,” when she’d told him about Lunk - when Arielle’s never been too good for anyone, nothing but another mouth for her aunt and uncle to feed, too brash, too ungrateful, too willing to roll around in haystacks with any boy who paid her a compliment; even Lunk had found someone better, had only shrugged when she’d caught him with a lapful of Seela, the blacksmith’s prettiest daughter.

So she’d kissed back, when Quentin had first leaned in and pressed his mouth to hers, eager for it, for his admiration, had let herself bask in it for one golden moment - and then pulled away and fixed him with a hard stare. “You and Eliot?”

Quentin looked away. “It’s not serious between us.”

“Oh?” She’d caught them once - had reached the clearing earlier in the day than usual, and seen Quentin sitting at the table outside, eating breakfast, had seen Eliot walk by the table, then stop and bend down to kiss him, soft and slow, a ‘good morning’ kind of kiss, his hand curving around Quentin’s shoulder for balance - 

“He doesn’t want -” Quentin shook his head, gave her a tight smile. “Eliot’s not really the settling-down type, you know? Well - not if he doesn’t have to. When he goes into town, he - we’re not - he won’t care.” 

“Oh,” Arielle said, sympathetically this time - Ember knew she understood about men with wandering eyes. 

“At least he’s honest about it,” Quentin said, and Arielle had nodded in agreement, had let Quentin take her hand, opened her mouth against his, but - it’s not that she didn’t trust Quentin, exactly, but she had still gone to talk to Eliot later, had sat with him at the table chopping vegetables for dinner.

“I don’t want to be Sweet Grelda,” Arielle said.

“Come again?”

Arielle frowned down at the carrot she was hacking to pieces. “You know what I mean, I don’t want to be the trollop running around behind your back, ruining things, I don’t want to -” _take anything from you_ \- she stopped herself from saying it, because it seemed absurdly arrogant to imagine that she could take anything from Eliot - suave, stunning Eliot, who carried out almost everything he did with an air of such elegant command that she had at first assumed that he must be the fortuneless son of some minor noble (although the longer she knew him, and noticed how unexpectedly knowledgeable he was about farming and how incredibly good he was at play-acting, the more she thought about the theatre troupe who performed at the tavern every fall, and the handsome boys who fled the surrounding farms and villages to join it) -

“You’re worried about being a homewrecker?” Eliot said, giving her an incredulous little smile - the word was unfamiliar, but its meaning was clear enough.

“It’s your home, and your man -”

“Quentin’s not my man,” Eliot said, firm. “So you can relax - you have my blessing, go ahead and canoodle with Q all you want. I hope it works out between you crazy kids.” 

She looked at him sideways - his words were right, and his tone, and his smile, easy and careless, but the problem was - Eliot _was_ so incredibly good at play-acting. 

She scooped up the remains of her carrot and dumped them in the bowl, then reached for the next one. “Can’t you do this with magic?”

“Sure, but it’s worth taking the time to do it by hand - with magic, the pieces end up all different sizes and then they don’t cook evenly. ”

“Hmm,” Arielle said, then said, “My friend Nandy and I used to share boys sometimes.”

Eliot’s hands stopped moving for half a second, then resumed chopping. “Really.”

“But then she went and married Tolf, who - don’t mistake me, is the very soul of kindness - but he’s also old and stodgy and possessive and thinks fun is for other people.”

“Tragic,” Eliot said. 

“Yes,” Arielle said, then sighed and put her knife down, looked at Eliot straight-on. “Eliot. I want you to understand - _I’m_ not stodgy, or possessive, and nothing has to change between you and Quentin just because he’s bedding me. And I’ll make sure Quentin understands that too.” 

Eliot said nothing, his mouth twisting strangely. 

“I mean, unless -”

Eliot raised an eyebrow in the direction of the onion he was vigorously decimating. “Unless?”

“That new bed is really - very big,” Arielle said, reached out to tap his forearm with the tips of her fingers, light, teasing. “Big enough for three, if you’re interested.”

Eliot turned and looked at her, and she thought again of the morning she’d seen them kissing - when they’d noticed her, Quentin had only laughed and blushed a little, but for a moment Eliot had looked - truly caught, guilty and alarmed, before he’d washed the expression from his face and replaced it with a smile.

Eliot didn’t smile now, but he lifted her hand from his arm and brought it to his lips, pressed a soft kiss to her knuckles, and Arielle felt herself flush. 

“Arielle, you’re a gentlewoman and a scholar,” Eliot said, and his voice was low and fond. 

Arielle laughed. “I’m most definitely neither of those.”

“I’ll - maybe take you up on that offer, on occasion,” Eliot said. “If you meant it.”

He was still holding her hand, and Arielle turned her fingers in his until she could return his grip. “I meant it.”)

And for the past year they had made it work somehow, the three of them, Arielle-and-Quentin and Eliot-and-Quentin and sometimes Arielle-and-Quentin-and-Eliot, and so she’s ready to say yes -

And then Quentin blurts out, “Wait, wait, before you - actually, I need to tell you something first.”

“Okay,” Arielle says, slowly, and Quentin looks at her, chewing on his lip, and then sits down in the tall grass, starts patting down a flat patch big enough for the two of them. 

“You might want to sit down,” Quentin says. “It’s kind of a long story.”

Arielle sits down next to him, says, “A long story? You?” because she likes to tease Quentin, and even now when he’s nervous and wound up tenser than a spring squirrel, it makes him smile and roll his eyes at her, relax just a smidgen.

“I know, hard to believe,” he says, and then takes a deep breath. “Um, so. So, there were these books I used to read, when I was a kid -”

It is a long story, long and very strange - she’s heard parts of it before, out of order and out of context: about the school for magicians where Quentin and Eliot had met, the Beast whose spell had injured Quentin’s shoulder, snippets of stories about the people they’d left behind (Margo, Julia, Alice, Fen -), and the quest to bring back magic, but she’s never heard the whole of it, from beginning to end. 

Or to middle, she supposes.

“So - you are a king,” Arielle says blankly, when Quentin’s done. She doesn’t know why this seems the most unlikely of all the wildly unlikely events in the story she’s just heard.

Quentin frowns up at the sky - they’re lying on their backs in the grass now, holding hands. “I guess, technically? I was, or I will be - verb tenses get so weird with time travel -”

Arielle shakes her head, pushes away that tidbit of information to digest later. “But you can’t change anything? Even though you know all those terrible things are going to happen?”

“We talked about it for ages,” Quentin says. “But there’s too many variables - we can’t take the chance that by trying to fix things, we’ll just fuck it up so much worse. So - we solve the mosaic, we get the key -”

“And you disappear back to the future forever,” Arielle says. It’s not that she hadn’t known that the end of the quest would mean the end of Quentin and Eliot at the mosaic, but she hadn’t understood until now how final that departure would be.

The corner of Quentin’s mouth twitches up for a second.

“What?”

“Nothing, there’s a movie - never mind. But you see how important it is, that we finish it, that I - that we fix it?” 

There’s something bitter burning its way up Arielle’s throat, because she does see how important it is to _Quentin_ to fix it - (thinks of how he’d sat for hours with Rashel’s sickly cow, trying spell after spell even though he’d said, dubious, when the widow had first shown up at the cottage asking for help, Eliot still away on a trip to town, that healing magic was complicated and mostly beyond him. The cow had died. They had walked back to the cottage together, through the shadowy woods, Quentin pale and silent beside her. “The loss of the cow won’t ruin her,” Arielle had said. “You did everything you could,” but Quentin had only ducked his head, said nothing.)

“I see,” Arielle says. She pulls her hand away from his, sits up so that she can look down at him. “And me? Am I coming to the future with you?”

“If that’s what you want,” Quentin says, his eyes darting across her face. “And if - that’s the thing, we don’t know how it works - we don’t know if we can take anyone with us -”

Arielle nods sharply, the bitterness igniting into fury, and starts to shove herself up to her feet. “And so that’ll be it then, you’ll be gone, back to the next part of your _fucking_ quest, and I’ll be left -”

“No, no, Jesus Christ, that’s not -” Quentin says, sitting up to grab at her hand, tug her back down. “If you can’t go, I’ll stay, of course I’ll fucking stay -” 

She stares at him, shocked, and Quentin blinks at her, holding her hand clasped tightly between both of his. “Ari, I’m asking you to marry me - if you stay, I stay. Even if you - even if it’s just that you don’t want to leave Fillory, I’ll stay.” 

“Oh,” Arielle says, and lets Quentin pull her into his arms. She presses her face against his shoulder and breathes, inhales the scent of woodsmoke and chalk and Quentin. “What about Eliot?”

She hears Quentin draw in a quick, pained breath, but he only says, “Eliot makes his own decisions.”

She doesn’t think it’s as simple as that, and Quentin must know it too, because he keeps talking, his voice muffled against her hair, “It’s all fucking theoretical now, anyway, it’s not like we can make plans - maybe we can all go back, or else maybe we’ll just like, tie the key to a rock and throw it through the portal tree, or -”

 _Or maybe you’ll never solve the mosaic_ , Arielle doesn’t say. That godsforsaken puzzle, anchoring them all in place, their lives spinning around it, keeping them teetering and caught in what if, what if - what if today’s the day? Or tomorrow? Or what if the day never comes? Such an uncertain way to live, and yet - Arielle’s always been a little too reckless for her own good.

“Alright,” Arielle says. “Yes.”

“Yes?” 

She smiles against his shoulder at the disbelief in his voice. “Yes.”

Quentin leans back so that he can look at her, his face bright with joy - and then he scrambles to his feet, catching her hands to pull her up with him. “Wait, I should - let me do this right -”

As soon as she’s standing, he sinks back down to one knee, says, “Arielle. Will you please do me the honor of marrying me?” 

Quentin asks it as solemnly and sincerely as if they were a lord and lady standing in the grand halls of Whitespire - as though he doesn’t know what the answer will be, as though he’s not kneeling in a field, unshaven, hair disheveled, in trousers that need patching at the knees, in front of Arielle, a farm girl wearing her second-best (second, total) dress, with mud on her hem and probably grass all over her back from where they’ve been lying down - 

And in that moment she believes, entirely and without reserve, that he is (or was, or will be) a king.

She smiles at him, blinking back tears, and drops into the deepest curtsy she can manage, says, “I will, my lord,” - and then tumbles to to the ground next to him, throws herself into his arms, kissing and kissing him as they both fall back into the grass.

Some time later: “I’ll get you a ring,” Quentin says. “I didn’t - sorry, I hadn’t really -”

“I don’t need a ring, it’ll only get caught on things and then I’ll take it off and lose it,” Arielle says, a little dreamy with afterglow. She thinks she might have rolled over on a thistle at some point, but still - worth it.

“Then I’ll get you another one,” Quentin says. “Eliot has a ring.”

“So he does.” Arielle puts her head on Quentin’s shoulder, enjoys the soft drag of his fingers through her hair. “You know, if we’re going to go to all the trouble of preparing a wedding feast for the whole neighborhood, you should ask Eliot too.” 

Quentin’s fingers stop moving. “Ask him what?”

“To marry you.”

Quentin barks out a sharp, surprised laugh, and half-sits up, staring down at her like she’s grown a second head. “Eliot doesn’t want to marry me.”

Now Arielle’s the one looking at him like he’s sprouted additional appendages. “Eliot _loves_ you.” She’s never talked about it so plainly before, but she’s also never said, ‘the cottage has a roof,’ or ‘the mosaic is made out of tiles’: facts so obvious that they don’t need to be said out loud.

Quentin stares at her, then shakes his head. “Sure, I mean, sure, he loves me, but not - he doesn’t -” At her disbelieving look, he throws himself back down in the grass, says flatly, “Trust me, I know. I asked him - I wanted - before. It’s not like that for him.”

“Well, that was a long time ago now, maybe he -” Quentin’s shaking his head again, and Arielle pokes him in the arm. “Quentin. What would it hurt to ask -”

“He’ll laugh.”

Arielle hikes herself up on one elbow to glare at him more effectively. “What in Ember’s great hairy arse are you talking about? Eliot’s not going to laugh at you.”

“Not _at_ me, but -” Quentin hesitates, then spits out, “He’ll laugh at the idea of it, he’ll - make a fucking joke, act like it doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t mean anything.”

How can you - you’re already mostly-married, Arielle wants to say, you share a house, you share a bed, you share a whole fucking life, if we have children they’ll be his children too, how can you not _see_ \- but she holds her tongue, because mostly-married is not married, and she’s no magician, to know what’s inside men’s hearts. Maybe Eliot would laugh. Quentin’s face has gone stubborn and stony, and he’s more obstinate than a goat (a non-Talking goat obviously, no offense meant to Goats) when he’s set his heels in, so Arielle sighs and lets herself drop back down, puts her head on his shoulder again.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay?”

“Yes, okay,” and she feels him start to relax. “Or - maybe I should ask Eliot.”

“You are not asking Eliot to marry me,” Quentin says, his shoulders jerking rigid with alarm.

“No, of course not,” Arielle says, and tilts her head up to look at him, blinking guilelessly. “I meant ask him to marry _me_.”

Quentin gawks at her, big-eyed and indignant, his mouth moving silently as he scrambles for words - and then she can’t hold it in anymore, throws back her head and cackles, and Quentin groans and closes his eyes, but he’s smiling.

“You’re a cruel, heartless woman,” Quentin says. “I’ve made a horrible mistake.”

“That’s true,” Arielle says, buries her face in his chest, still laughing. “But it’s too late for you now. I’m staying forever.”

* * *

“We’re going to make a day of it,” Nandy says. “Get there in the morning, visit the market, then watch the royal procession from the Newer Longer Bridge. What do you think? There’s room on the cart for you all.” 

For an indulgent second, Arielle lets herself imagine it: the excitement of a trip to Ramstown, the noise and color of its sprawling market, standing on the bridge with Quentin and Eliot, Teddy up on Eliot’s shoulders so he can see, watching the High King and High Queen of Fillory pass by with their retinue, a glimpse into that sparkling other world -

“We can’t,” she says regretfully. “I promised Anga she’d have our help in the orchard this week, and even if we could beg off, that’s the day of Rica and Tif’s barn-raising - Eliot said he’d be there.” (Eliot has had a standing invitation to every single barn-raising as well as any and all other construction projects within a day’s walk of the cottage ever since the morning three years ago when Del’s oldest boy had misstepped and skidded down the side of a half-built roof, had tumbled over the edge with a scream - and then had stopped, impossibly, had hung frozen in the air next to the edge of the roof until his father and uncle had yanked him back to safety - and on the ground, Eliot had sunk to his knees, blood streaming down his face from a nosebleed.)

“Oh, right,” Nandy says. “Well, it was just an idea - it would have been nice to spend the day together, I haven’t seen much of you this summer.” She throws her arm around Arielle’s shoulders, tugs her closer along the bench where they’re sitting, and Arielle sighs and puts her head on Nandy’s shoulder, lets herself lean into Nandy’s familiar soft comfort. There’s a cool breeze shaking the tree-tops and ruffling the wisps escaping from her braided hair, likely promising more rain tonight.

“It’s been a little rough,” Arielle says. Quentin had caught a bad cold at the tail-end of the spring, which had inevitably spread to the rest of them, Teddy had gotten pink-eye twice, and the roof had leaked during a torrential rainstorm and had had to be almost entirely replaced. She’s exhausted, frankly, feels like she’s been trudging through each day with her head down, just trying to make it to the next.

Eliot emerges from the cottage and passes by their bench on his way back to the mosaic, where he’s copying down the last pattern of the day, and Nandy turns her head to watch him walk by. 

“Hi Eliot,” Nandy says, and Arielle bites back a smile. It’s been years now, and Nandy still finds Arielle’s relationship with Quentin and Eliot endlessly entertaining - she’s given up on trying to stop Nandy from calling them ‘your husbands’ after Nandy threatened to start using ‘your harem’ instead. 

“Hi Nandy,” Eliot says, looking over at them with a wry smile. “How are you enjoying this beautiful summer evening?”

“Just fine, thank you,” Nandy says. “The view’s definitely improving -”

“Did you want some scrumpy?” Arielle says, pointing at the jug, partially to interrupt Nandy and partially to see the disgusted look on Eliot’s face when she asks.

“Sweet mother of fuck, no - is that what you’re drinking?”

(The first time Quentin and Eliot had tried scrumpy, Eliot had taken a sip, winced, then looked irritated at himself for wincing. 

Quentin had spat his mouthful out onto the ground. “What the fuck? What _is_ that? You said it was cider!”

“Don’t be a baby, it is cider, it’s made from peaches,” Arielle had said, rolling her eyes. “Well - mostly peaches.”

Eliot had taken another sip, winced even harder. “Gah. This is - no.”)

“We had all that extra fruit, so I made another batch,” Arielle says, grinning at him. “Sure you don’t want a taste?”

“That shit is, bar none, the worst thing I’ve ever drunk,” Eliot says. “And I’ve drunk jungle juice out of a milk jug at a party in a fucking cornfield. And ‘punch’ made from the dregs of like, the ten lousiest hipster cocktails Brooklyn has ever produced.”

Nandy stares at him, then turns to Arielle and says in a loud whisper, “See, Arielle? That’s what you get for getting mixed up with strange men from away - no respect at all for our fine Fillorian traditions.”

“Fine Fillorian _moonshine_ -”

“But they’re so pretty, Nandy,” Arielle says mournfully, and winks at Eliot, who winks back, then throws up his hands in faux-exasperation and stomps back towards the mosaic. 

Nandy gives her hand an understanding pat. “Very true. Fine, ignore the bond of our friendship for your pretty men and your community obligations, I’ll forgive you somehow. I’ll commit all the details of the royal procession to memory and come see you when we get back. Let me know if you need anything from Ramstown?”

Eliot must have overheard - because later, after Nandy’s rounded up her girls from where Quentin had been leading the three of them and Teddy in a cacophonous round of ‘What Time Is It, Mr. Dragon?’ and hauled them off down the path in the direction of home, Eliot says, “You could go with Nandy to Ramstown and see the procession.”

Arielle looks at him from where she’s standing beside the bench, stretching out her back, and Eliot shrugs. “Or you and Quentin could take Teddy, we don’t all have to miss it just because of the barn-raising.”

“No, we really should stay and help Anga -” 

“You wanted to see the procession?” Quentin says, herding Teddy away from the forest, where he’d been stubbornly yelling his goodbyes into the trees even after Nandy and her daughters were long out of earshot.

“We don’t have the time,” Arielle says, as Teddy rockets into her legs, and she reaches down to ruffle his hair. “We’re so behind with everything, there’s no point in wasting a day just so I can catch sight of royalty.”

”It wouldn’t be a waste - ” Quentin says, frowning.

“Royalty?” Teddy asks.

“The King and Queen of all of Fillory,” Arielle says, looking down at him; she schools her face into seriousness, lowers her voice. “But you know what?”

“What?” Teddy whispers back.

“I get to wake up to royalty every day,” Arielle says, and then whirls Teddy up into her arms with a whoop as he shrieks with joy. “Prince Theodore Rupert the Daring of Fillory, that scallywag, that wild adventurer and daredevil!”

She spins around a couple of times then puts Teddy back down, out of breath; she’s a little dizzy from the scrumpy, and Teddy’s been getting so heavy lately. 

“You know what we need?” Eliot says.

“The internal combustion engine? The last half-dozen steps of how to open a short-distance portal that neither of us can remember?” Quentin says.

“A new cottage that’s not falling apart? Maybe one that has this ‘bathroom’ you keep promising will be finished soon?” Arielle says.

“Wow, the hilarity, it’s overwhelming, I’m overwhelmed - you two should take that show on the road,” Eliot says. “The bathroom is a work in progress, I only have to reinvent the foundations of architectural magic, no big deal.” He reaches into the basket of plums on the table and tosses one at each of their heads. 

Quentin dodges, swearing, but Arielle catches her plum and takes a bite, says mid-chew, “But we love you, so you get to see the show for free. Aren’t you lucky?”

“Daddy said ‘shit’!” Teddy says gleefully, climbing up on the bench and grabbing at the basket, clearly hoping to fill his tiny hands with fruit projectiles of his very own.

“You started it, you deal with it,” Quentin says, pointing at Eliot, who sighs and scoops Teddy up off the bench and away from the fruit, ignoring his thwarted wails.

“I’m indecently, undeservedly lucky,” Eliot says, then hurries on before Arielle can say anything, “but as I was saying: what we need is a date night.”

Quentin makes a considering noise. “It has been a while.”

‘Date night’ as a concept has always seemed vaguely ridiculous to Arielle, who’d only had ‘dates’ explained to her post-marriage and post-Teddy - (Arielle: “So we’re scheduling an elaborate sex night in our own house?” Quentin: “No, not - um. Not exactly -” Eliot: “Yes, exactly. I know we’re all exhausted, but we need some goddamn romance around here - and for the record? Rolling on top of someone and mumbling ‘you wanna?’ doesn’t fucking count -”)

Eliot sees the dubious face she’s making, says, “Come on, we’ll get Tif to watch Teddy, she owes me - we can relax, break out the good carrot wine -”

”Oxymoron,” Quentin says, but he’s smiling, eyes soft and hopeful, and Arielle smiles back despite herself.

“Why do men always think everything can be solved with sex?” she says, and then holds her hands up as they both open their mouths, “But fine! To the calendar, then,” and leads the way around to the side of the cottage where Eliot draws the chalk calendar in a half-futile attempt to keep track of everyone’s comings and goings. (It mostly works, except for when parts of it get washed away by rain, or when Ember causes time to reverse itself for a week or festivals to change their days at his godly whim.) 

She stares at it, hands on her hips, Quentin and Eliot beside her, Teddy in Eliot’s arms, his face buried against Eliot’s shoulder - already half-asleep, the last of his energy burned out in raging against the injustice of the plums.

They stand in silence for a minute. 

Quentin tilts his head. “So, first free evening. Only - six days from now?”

“It’s market day with my aunt the next morning,” Arielle says. “Not doing it tired and hungover.”

“Then eight days from now.”

“It’s a date,” Eliot says. “A brief, calm yet sexy respite in the glamorous whirlwind of our lives.” 

Teddy snores adenoidally into his shoulder, and Arielle snorts. “One of you gets to make dinner.”

“Not it,” Quentin says.

“Okay, that thing I said about being lucky? I’m taking it back,” Eliot says.

The first rule of date night is everyone wears their best clothes on date night - (“It should be ‘don’t talk about date night’, obviously,” Quentin had said, and he and Eliot had argued about ‘homoeroticism’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ for ten very boring minutes until Arielle had said, “We’re already the subject of so much scandalous gossip I can’t imagine this would make it much worse,” and Eliot had laughed, delighted, and Quentin had said, “Wait, we’re the subject of _scandalous gossip_?” “We’re like the longest-running episode of _Three’s Company_ the village has ever seen, Q.”)

She’s still tugging on her overshirt (blue with purple threads and a tear at the sleeve where Teddy had grabbed too hard, she should get Quentin to mend it), when Quentin calls through the door, “Ari, don’t come out yet, just - stay inside a little longer, okay?”

“Is something on fire?” she calls back, straightening her shirt. “Because if something’s on fire I’m not staying in here, I don’t care how many fire-repellent spells you cast on this place -”

“Nothing’s on fire!” Quentin sounds exasperated instead of frantic, so she shrugs and checks her hair in the small mirror balanced on top of the chest of drawers next to the bed, pats at the fly-aways and wonders if Eliot would notice if she borrowed a tiny bit of his eye-liner since hers is almost gone, defying their strict no-sharing-cosmetics policy -

“Okay, we’re - you can come out now!”

She abandons her schemes for Eliot’s eyeliner and heads to the door, throws it open. “What in Umber’s high holy arse was so -” and then she stops. 

“I had a secret plan,” Quentin says. 

The entire clearing is transformed somehow, its lines lit up silver, bright against the evening’s dusky gloom, every part of it - the tables, chairs, daybed, benches, torches, the mosaic itself - surrounded by gleaming ghostly afterimages. 

Filaments of silver light travel up into the sky, arching towards each other to meet in the center, like the vault of some great domed ceiling, high overhead. The table is laid out with the dinner Eliot’s cooked, the silvery light gilding their ordinary plates and crockery, all the familiar rough edges turned strange and lovely.

“I wanted to make it look like Whitespire,” Quentin says. He shrugs, when she looks at him, half-smiles - his clothes are streaked with silver too, edging his sleeves and collar - and there’s a crown on his head, a subtle twist of light curving over his hair. “It turns out an illusion on that scale would take at least a couple of months of prep, but I still wanted to do something, so we kind of improvised - so, do you -”

“What he’s trying to say is: welcome to your castle, my queen,” Eliot says, then drops into one of those graceful bows that he’s so good at, before straightening up to smile at her - he’s besilvered and becrowned as well, the light even winding its way around the bottle of carrot wine that he’s unsealing. 

“Do you like it?” Quentin asks, and he’s - watching her closely, actually nervous, and she steps into the clearing with blurry eyes, says, “I love it, it’s - it’s the most beautiful thing, thank you -”

As she walks through the doorway, the silver light dances its way across her clothes, coating her with the same ethereal glow - she holds her arms out to see how it paints her sleeves, then spins in place to make her skirts swirl out in a riot of shimmering silver, laughs wild and giddy, like child, like she’s no more than Teddy’s age.

Quentin’s standing in front of her when she’s done, holding a crown in his hands - or, floating it in mid-air over his hands, as airy and insubstantial as his own.

He lifts his hands towards her, and she bows her head - it’s weightless on her head but she can feel it somehow all the same, a zing of awareness where it touches her hair as Quentin lowers his hands, reaches down to take hers between his own instead. 

“I crown you Queen Arielle the Bold,” Quentin says, “Queen of all of Fillory,” and he’s smiling a little, but his eyes are dark and steady, his hands warm on hers, and he _means_ it, he _believes_ it - 

\- and as she leans in to kiss him, for one shining moment she believes it too.

~

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the folk song "Lavender Blue":  
>  _Lavender's blue, dilly dilly  
>  Lavender's green  
> When I am king, dilly dilly  
> You will be queen_
> 
> Arielle and Fillory in this story were vaguely inspired by Terry Pratchett's Lancre in his Discworld books, and I make two Discworld jokes - first the "bugger a hedgehog" as a reference to the famous Hedgehog Song, and then the scrumpy being made of "Mostly peaches", much like Discworld's scumble.
> 
> The story of 'the little gentleman and his gardener' is referencing the Lord of the Rings, and also a certain meme.


End file.
